06
earlyyears.teachwire.net
By looking to the habits of successful organisations in
other fields, nursery settings can benefit themselves and
the wider early years sector, says
June O’Sullivan...
usiness is one of the
most powerful forces in
society. Good businesses
act in the interest of the
common good. They are
often described as values-led businesses
and have a clear ethos that business has
a responsibility to the people, which is
integrated into all aspects of their vision,
strategy and operating plan. This also
makes good business sense, as just
as consumers are loyal to companies
whose values they share, employees
who feel they are working for some
higher purpose – as opposed to just
trying to maximise the profits of the
company they work for – are likely to be
more productive.
The majority of nurseries are small
or medium businesses, and I believe we
need to collaborate more with the wider
business world so we can learn good
habits from their research, and other
sectors can learn from us. Businesses
are all too often insular, specialist and
almost adversarial. We need to develop
the idea that good nursery businesses
are part of the national infrastructure.
Good nurseries enable people to work,
employ staff, help prepare children
for life, and play a part in how other
businesses large and small develop
family-friendly policies.
SHARED
CHALLENGES
Every business needs a strategy to set it
on a winning streak. The strategy turns
the business’s vision into reality. It’s about
bringing in customers, bringing in enough
money to meet your outgoings and
ultimately generating a profit to ensure
there is enough to pay shareholders
(who may own the company) or for
development. All businesses need to
invest in improvement of staff and their
service if they’re to remain successful.
This is no different whether you run a
small or a large business, or a social
enterprise (which I do), where the profit is
described as social impact.
There is therefore much to learn
from those writing about businesses
or researching ways of improving the
efficiency and effectiveness of businesses.
When I was writing
Successful
Leadership in the Early Years
, I spent a
great deal of time looking at non-childcare
businesses, and the challenges we share.
For example, the airlines and hotels have
to understand occupancy as well as
we do in childcare because occupancy,
whether you are selling nursery places,
seats on a plane or rooms in a hotel, is
the key to keeping the business safe. That
may seem a little shocking, but it helped
me think through how I could develop a
range of more flexible places for families
– and once the core business is secure
you can then pay much more attention to
the quality of the service provided.
RETAINING STAFF
I read a great deal of this business
research to figure out how better to
attract staff and improve induction,
B
There are great
similarities in the
ways in which all
businesses are
made, run and
sustained.
which is the point where staff are most
likely to leave whether they have joined
a large corporate or a small nursery. A
Harvard Business Review asked how
committed were employees at any one
time. They found that generally:
33%
are “high risk” – that is, not
committed to their present
employer and not planning to stick
around for the next two years;
39%
are “trapped” – they
aren’t committed to the
organisation, but they are currently
planning to stay for the next two years;
24%
are “truly loyal” – both
committed to the
organisation and planning to stay on for
at least two years.
Knowing this makes good
business sense as it allows you
to shape your recruitment strategy
and then create a set of activities and
support systems that are more likely to
retain
staff once you have recruited them. For
a childcare business, where the biggest
cost is staff, it makes sound financial
sense to learn what troubles staff, why
they don’t stay and what
keeps them happy.
Knowledge is a great lever to
intelligent business management. The
CEEDA Workforce Report 2015 reported
that 11% of staff were actively job
hunting and 39% of staff had itchy feet,
so let’s learn from the wider business
community. Good organisations are
constantly looking for ways to encourage
and support staff, and most people want
to be part of their organisation, want to
know the organisation’s purpose and
want to make a difference. How we
nurture this can be learned both from
within the early years sector but also
“We can learn a
lot from business”
